Subj : wrap
To   : Nicholas Boel
From : Carlos Navarro
Date : Sun Apr 07 2024 10:36:10

04 Apr 2024 17:29, you wrote to me:

 CN>> Nevertheless, those are the suggested values (that JamNNTPd
 CN>> uses). Other numbers could be used instead, as long as they are
 CN>> 78 or less.

 NB> Ok. So it's doing what it should be doing, then?

Yes.

 CN>> The code block for format=flowed appends spaces to the end of
 CN>> wrapped lines and does the 'space stuffing' at the beginning
 CN>> (inserts extra space if it begins with space), as defined in the
 CN>> RFC.

 NB> Why would you want to stuff spaces at the beginning of a line if it
 NB> starts with a space? What is the reasoning behind that?

It seems it's because of this:

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Space-Stuffing

   In order to allow for unquoted lines which start with ">", and to
   protect against systems which "From-munge" in-transit messages
   (modifying any line which starts with "From " to ">From "),
   Format=Flowed provides for space-stuffing.
[...]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 NB> I think the problem comes in to play with this example:

 NB> Quoting a 78 (78 is just an example, it could probably be anywhere
 NB> from 74 or 75 or more characters) character line with smartquote will
 NB> not reformat the line back to 78 characters (or within the 79 line
 NB> width limit it should be at). It will then append the space, initials,
 NB> quote character, and another space.. now making it 4 or 5 characters
 NB> longer. This will then wrap the last word to the next line and it
 NB> won't have a quote character in front of it.

 NB> I would imagine it would also do this without smartquote enabled,
 NB> however it wouldn't add as many characters to the line, so you would
 NB> see the issue less (only when a line hits 77 or 78 characters
 NB> probably).

That's a different issue....

I intend to experiment a bit with Thunderbird's mailnews.wraplength setting. Maybe a value higher than the default (72) would work better with Fidonet (but there may be other problems...)

 NB> Golded seems to handle this, but Golded also seems to support
 NB> displaying quoted lines longer than 79 characters, which may very well
 NB> be because of the issue(s) above.

GoldED is great with handling all types of quotes. I'm afraid we cannot expect all newsreaders to work fine with FTN-style quotes (AFAIK only HotdogEd does).

Carlos

--- GoldED+/W32-MSVC 1.1.5-b20180707
 * Origin: cyberiada (2:341/234.1)

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